An idea can also have a kind of life. An idea – escaping, now, the psychologism or the historicism that would confine it to a peculiarities of a life, or to an historical context – and that even contextualises those contexts in turn: an idea from which you live, and to which you owe duty.
Isn’t this the way to read the biographical data Blanchot allowed to printed on his books? ‘Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic was born in 1907. His life is entirely devoted to literature and to the silence unique to it.’ Isn’t this the first way in which one should understand his life? But I suppose the idea that contextualises a life must also be contextualised: it is necessary, too, to trace its origins, even if, as it comes to itself, it slips back before it and runs ahead of it: even if, as idea, it begins to live its own life and to impose its own imperatives.
Blanchot himself gives the clue in the little text Les Recontres, where he sets a few names aside one another: Levinas, Bataille, Char, Antelme, in terms of the friendship with whom the course of the idea might be understood. This is not to say the idea is unoriginal, or that it was formed in collaboration: it is more complex than that, for what drew him to each of these men was also the idea, even as it sought to give form to itself, to live.
With Levinas, the reading of Heidegger, and the negotation of his thought. With Bataille, ideas of communication, transgression and experience: each friendship must be understood in the context of the destiny of an idea. Imagine that: isn’t it what it means to live deliberately: to be caught by an idea, to be claimed by it, and to let it lead you into friendships and perhaps through them, as Breton discarded certain Surrealists from the fray. The idea can exhaust a friendship. Move on, move away. It must burn between us, the third, or we are nothing.
Of course, with Blanchot, it is still more complex, for the third is the exploration of the conditions of the genesis of the idea in friendship. Then it is friendship itself that is at issue in his friendships; it is the third term. Just as it is community that is at stake whenever Blanchot allows enters into political life. And it is literature – writing – that is the third term whenever he writes. Each time an experience – each time a kind of test that friendship, community and writing must endure.
Does he live for an idea? His life is not his life because of that idea. It is more than him – or less. And to its demand he responds wholly, making a gift of his life, giving his life to silence. But a gift that is not quite a self-sacrifice – that isn’t only the result of a deliberate will. What effort did it cost him not to be photographed or interviewed, or not to meet researchers interested in his work? Perhaps very little. Perhaps it barely bothered him. Nevertheless, each time, it was the conditions of his work that mattered. His work, his life – the gift he was given: the idea. The gift he could give: his life – but only as it had already been caught and implicated by the idea.
Who doesn’t want to live for an idea? To blaze with certainty? I am only certain in the mornings: then, for an hour or so, I have a fanatic’s zeal. It is beautiful, even if in the rest of the day I am a husk. Could I say I was in the grip of an idea? – that an idea had reached me? Later, on, as the day tilts towards evening, I will say: I’ve never had an idea, not one. Slightly earlier, in the afternoon, I might say: its was his idea, not mine. And earlier than that?
Is there really a kind of research that is literary, or at least writerly, where it matters not only what is said, but that it is said, and in a particular way? In The Unnameable, Beckett allows him to name narrators of his previous books, and not only in the Trilogy, as if he had always been following a single path: Malone, Molloy, Moran, but also Watt. And Blanchot’s récits seem to recall one another, and to follow on from one another, in a single trajectory. What is being sought, and by what means? Or rather, what seeks itself, and by way of what kind of sacrifice?
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